April 6, 2017

My 2nd grade students loved Book Madness! I watched my Instagram blow up with teachers doing this, and I wanted to join the bandwagon. We had a blast listening to our stories. I got the banner from Second Grade Sizzle and the tournament headings from Brown Bag Teacher. Both FREE! A wonderful teacher created the book headings and opinion writing template. I had to switch out a couple of books, but it was easy to do. Leave me a comment and I will email them to you.

I wanted to do my Book Madness the same time with NCAA's March Madness. It's easy to read picture books for this tournament. It's best you start creating your list at the beginning of the school year with chapter books if you want to start with Sweet 16. You can start with eight books for the Elite 8. My Book Madness was easier to coincide with March Madness since I used picture books.

Students votes counted as points. So, the book with the most points won the tourney. My second graders loved the suspense as to which book had the most points. The book that won by one point was the Buzzer Beater Book!

January 6, 2017

Here is a quick and easy snowflake art by Art Projects for Kids. We first painted our backgrounds using watercolors. While students were painting I went around sprinkling kosher salt. You want to sprinkle the salt on before the paint dries. If the paint does dry before you can get to student number ten just brush it down with a wet paintbrush and sprinkle the salt. It actually made the colors blend beautifully! The website created this art for cards. I just used regular water color paper and had the kids cut out snowflakes with coffee filters.

You want to wait for the paint to dry and then wipe the salt off the paper. The salt gives off a nice texture look for the background. Glue the snowflakes on any edges of the paper making sure some of it is not on the actual paper and snip the excess off.